Medicine, Mystery & the Divine Near Leshan

China is the birthplace of one of the world's oldest continuous medical traditions. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), with roots stretching back over 2,500 years, is based on concepts of qi (vital energy), yin-yang balance, and the five elements. The Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine), compiled around the 2nd century BCE, remains a foundational text. Hua Tuo (c. 140-208 CE) is celebrated as the first surgeon to use general anesthesia (mafeisan) during operations, and Li Shizhen's 16th-century Bencao Gangmu (Comperta of Materia Medica) catalogued over 1,800 medicinal substances. Acupuncture, herbal medicine, and practices like qigong and tai chi continue to be widely practiced alongside Western medicine.

Modern Chinese medicine achieved a landmark in 2015 when Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering artemisinin, an antimalarial compound derived from the traditional Chinese herb qinghao (sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua). This discovery, which has saved millions of lives, beautifully exemplifies the bridge between ancient herbal knowledge and modern pharmacology. China's healthcare system has undergone massive expansion, with institutions like Peking Union Medical College Hospital (founded 1921 by the Rockefeller Foundation) serving as centers of excellence. China also pioneered variolation — an early form of smallpox inoculation — centuries before Edward Jenner developed vaccination in England.

China's ghost traditions span over three millennia and are deeply embedded in the fabric of Chinese civilization, drawing from Confucian ancestor worship, Taoist cosmology, and Buddhist theology. The Chinese concept of gui (鬼) encompasses a vast taxonomy of spirits, from benevolent ancestral ghosts who protect their descendants to malevolent hungry ghosts (饿鬼, è guǐ) who were denied proper burial or mourning rites. The Hungry Ghost Festival (中元节, Zhōngyuán Jié), observed on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, is one of China's most important supernatural observances. During this period, the gates of the underworld are believed to open, releasing spirits to roam the earth. Families burn joss paper (representing money), paper houses, cars, and even paper smartphones as offerings to ensure their deceased relatives' comfort in the afterlife, while elaborate Taoist and Buddhist ceremonies are performed to appease wandering ghosts.

Perhaps China's most iconic supernatural figure is the jiangshi (僵尸), the "stiff corpse" or hopping vampire, a reanimated cadaver that moves by hopping with outstretched arms. Rooted in Qing Dynasty folklore, jiangshi were said to be created when a person died far from home and a Taoist priest would reanimate the body to "hop" it back for proper burial — a practice possibly inspired by the real tradition of transporting corpses over mountains using bamboo poles, which gave the appearance of hopping. Chinese ghost lore also features the nü gui (女鬼), a female ghost typically dressed in red who died unjustly and returns for vengeance, and the yuan gui (冤鬼), ghosts of those who died from injustice who haunt the living until their grievances are addressed.

The Chinese afterlife is conceived as a vast bureaucratic underworld called Diyu (地狱), presided over by Yanluo Wang (the King of Hell, adapted from the Hindu Yama) and staffed by judges who review the moral record of each soul. This underworld contains multiple courts and levels of punishment, reflecting the Confucian emphasis on moral accountability. The concept of ancestor worship — maintaining tablets, offering food and incense at household altars, and performing ceremonies during Qingming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day) — remains one of Chinese civilization's most enduring practices, reflecting the belief that the dead continue to influence the fortunes of the living.

China's vast history contains numerous accounts of miraculous healings, many associated with Taoist immortals, Buddhist bodhisattvas, and folk deities. Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara), the Bodhisattva of Compassion, is widely venerated as a healer, and temples dedicated to Guanyin — such as the Putuoshan temple complex in Zhejiang Province — maintain extensive records of attributed miraculous cures spanning centuries. In TCM, the concept of "miraculous" healing is often framed differently than in the West, with practitioners pointing to cases where correct qi alignment produced seemingly impossible recoveries. Modern Chinese hospitals have documented cases of spontaneous remission that combine elements of traditional practice and unexplained phenomena. The qigong movement of the 1980s and 1990s produced numerous claims of extraordinary healing abilities, some investigated by Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers, though many remained controversial.

The Midwest's tradition of keeping things running—tractors, combines, houses, marriages—near Leshan, Sichuan produces patients who approach their own bodies with the same maintenance mindset. They don't seek medical care for optimal health; they seek it to remain functional. The wise Midwest physician meets patients where they are, translating 'optimal' into 'good enough to get back to work,' and building from there.

Small-town doctor culture in the Midwest near Leshan, Sichuan produced a form of medicine that modern healthcare systems are trying to recapture: the physician who knows every patient by name, who makes house calls in snowstorms, who takes payment in chickens when cash is scarce. This wasn't quaint—it was effective. Longitudinal relationships between doctors and patients produce better outcomes than any algorithm.

Medical missionaries from Midwest churches near Leshan, Sichuan have established healthcare infrastructure in some of the world's most underserved communities. These missionaries—physicians, nurses, dentists, and public health workers—carry a faith conviction that their medical skills are divine gifts meant to be shared. Whether this conviction produces better or merely different medicine is debatable, but the facilities they've built are unambiguously saving lives.

German immigrant faith practices near Leshan, Sichuan blended Lutheran piety with folk medicine in ways that persist in Midwest medical culture. The Braucher—a folk healer who combined prayer, herbal remedies, and sympathetic magic—was a fixture of German-American communities well into the 20th century. Modern physicians who serve these communities occasionally encounter patients who've consulted a Braucher before visiting the clinic.

Prohibition-era speakeasies sometimes occupied the same buildings as Midwest medical offices near Leshan, Sichuan, creating a layered history of healing and revelry. Hospital workers in these repurposed buildings report the unmistakable sound of jazz piano at 2 AM, the clink of glasses in empty rooms, and the sweet smell of bootleg whiskey—a festive haunting that provides comic relief in an otherwise somber genre.

The loneliness of the Midwest winter, when snow isolates communities near Leshan, Sichuan for weeks at a time, produces ghost stories born of cabin fever and medical necessity. The physician who snowshoed five miles to deliver a baby in 1887 is said to still make his rounds during blizzards, visible through the curtain of falling snow as a dark figure bent against the wind, bag in hand, answering a call that never ended.

The work of Dr. Michael Persinger at Laurentian University on the "God Helmet"—a device that applies weak, complex magnetic fields to the temporal lobes—has been cited as evidence that spiritual and anomalous experiences are products of electromagnetic stimulation rather than genuine encounters with nonphysical realities. Persinger reported that approximately 80% of subjects wearing the God Helmet experienced a "sensed presence"—the feeling that another person or entity was nearby—and some reported more elaborate mystical experiences including out-of-body sensations and encounters with "divine" beings. These findings have been interpreted by materialists as evidence that anomalous experiences in hospitals and other settings are artifacts of electromagnetic stimulation, produced by the complex electromagnetic environments of clinical settings rather than by genuine nonphysical phenomena. However, the God Helmet research is more equivocal than this interpretation suggests. A Swedish replication attempt by Granqvist and colleagues, published in Neuroscience Letters (2005), found no significant effects of the magnetic fields and attributed Persinger's results to suggestibility and expectation. Persinger responded by identifying methodological differences between the studies. For physicians and researchers in Leshan, Sichuan, the God Helmet debate illustrates the difficulty of determining whether anomalous experiences are caused by electromagnetic stimulation, mediated by it, or merely correlated with it. "Physicians' Untold Stories" by Dr. Scott Kolbaba documents experiences that share some features with Persinger's laboratory findings—sensing presences, perceiving non-physical realities—but that also include features his experiments cannot replicate: accurate perception of distant events, shared experiences between independent observers, and lasting transformative effects. The God Helmet may tell us something about how the brain processes anomalous experiences, but it does not necessarily tell us whether those experiences have external referents.

The emerging field of 'death studies' — thanatology — has increasingly embraced a multidisciplinary approach that integrates medical, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual perspectives on dying. The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), and the European Association for Palliative Care have all developed research agendas that include unexplained phenomena as legitimate subjects of scientific inquiry. This institutional recognition represents a significant shift from the historical tendency of the medical establishment to ignore or dismiss phenomena that do not fit within the materialist framework. For the medical and academic communities in Leshan, this shift opens opportunities for research, education, and clinical practice that integrate the full range of human experience at the end of life — including the experiences that Dr. Kolbaba's physician witnesses have so courageously documented.

The work of Dr. Michael Persinger at Laurentian University on the "God Helmet"—a device that applies weak, complex magnetic fields to the temporal lobes—has been cited as evidence that spiritual and anomalous experiences are products of electromagnetic stimulation rather than genuine encounters with nonphysical realities. Persinger reported that approximately 80% of subjects wearing the God Helmet experienced a "sensed presence"—the feeling that another person or entity was nearby—and some reported more elaborate mystical experiences including out-of-body sensations and encounters with "divine" beings. These findings have been interpreted by materialists as evidence that anomalous experiences in hospitals and other settings are artifacts of electromagnetic stimulation, produced by the complex electromagnetic environments of clinical settings rather than by genuine nonphysical phenomena. However, the God Helmet research is more equivocal than this interpretation suggests. A Swedish replication attempt by Granqvist and colleagues, published in Neuroscience Letters (2005), found no significant effects of the magnetic fields and attributed Persinger's results to suggestibility and expectation. Persinger responded by identifying methodological differences between the studies. For physicians and researchers in Leshan, Sichuan, the God Helmet debate illustrates the difficulty of determining whether anomalous experiences are caused by electromagnetic stimulation, mediated by it, or merely correlated with it. "Physicians' Untold Stories" by Dr. Scott Kolbaba documents experiences that share some features with Persinger's laboratory findings—sensing presences, perceiving non-physical realities—but that also include features his experiments cannot replicate: accurate perception of distant events, shared experiences between independent observers, and lasting transformative effects. The God Helmet may tell us something about how the brain processes anomalous experiences, but it does not necessarily tell us whether those experiences have external referents.